Future U: Rise of the digital humanities

Lending the power of technology to age-old studies of the human condition.

Future U is a multipart series on the university of the 21st century. We will be investigating the possible future of the textbook, the technological development of libraries, how tech may change the role of the professor, and the future role of technology in museums, research parks, and university-allied institutions of all kinds.

The trends we have encountered in exploring Future U—social tech, the Web, crowdsourcing, data visualization, new tools and old concerns, the classics and the cutting edge—all seem to dovetail nicely into the nascent discipline of digital technologies. And digital humanities is, at its simplest, the use of digital tools and processes in the service of the humanities, those academic pursuits that focus on understanding the human condition.

As in so many questions whose rhetorical fulcrum is the application of new technology, a great deal of the sound and fury surrounding digital humanities comes from two extremes: those who believe the digital half of digital humanities will save the humanities half and those who believe it will destroy it.

"Digital Humanities have a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent from the counterculture—cyberculture intertwinglings of the 60s and 70s," Presner asserts, painting the entire discipline with "revolutionary" stain.

"Whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author," writes Fish in opposition.

"Digital humanities does have an activist agenda," insisted Miriam Posner, digital humanities coordinator and faculty member of UCLA's Digital Humanities Center. "It's about democratizing information so more people have access to it. People involved in the digital humanities are attuned to the way the academy is configured and are intent on reconfiguring so credit is apportioned equally."

The problem with the argument, of course, is that both sides are fighting the culture war of the Sixties, forty years too late. And neither position seems to fully reflect digital humanities in the place it really counts: where the rubber meets the road.

People are actually doing something

"While this argument is going on," responds Stanford Digital Humanities Specialist Elijah Meeks, "while all this hot air is going back and forth, people are actually doing something."

Meeks' problem with this clash of the titans is that both sides are wrong about what digital humanities is and why it's important.

The small slice of people marshaling themselves to argue the Fish/Presner solipsism "think (digital humanities) is something they can hop into and maintain themselves in, and maintain a separation, as if we didn’t all have smartphones!"

People like Meeks, on the other hand, attached to the Stanford Library system, lend their expertise to a wide spectrum of academics doing hands-on work in their discipline. They need digital humanities specialists to help them with the code. But according to Meeks, those academics are already thinking in code.

The Work

Digital Karnak: a layer-rich exploration of the ancient Egyptian city of Karnak from UCLA

Hypercities: a collaborative research and educational platform for exploring the historical layers of cities from UCLA

Redlining Philadelphia: an exploration of racially based neighborhood classifications in the 1930s from the University of Philadelphia

Codex Sinaiticus: a project to present and understand the oldest copy of the New Testament from the Monastery of St. Catherine, the British Library, Leipzig University, and the National Library of Russia

Domain Names Project: utilizing cross-disciplinary, international institutional knowledge to help in the globalization of Internet domain names, from UCLA

During a conversation with one literature professor with whom Meeks is currently working, the professor asked, "'Can’t we just take this thing and flip it and move this around...' He was able, in natural language, to talk about code! This is not a monkhood, this is part of his practice. Integrating a system, relating how this relates to that is writing code. It's formal theorizing."

"'Revolutionary' is a word that got attached to computing in the Forties," Willard McCarty, professor of humanities computing at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London and at the School of Computing, Engineering, and Mathematics at the University of Western Sydney told Ars. "A revolution is a complete break with the past, and revolutions always get eaten up by the past they haven’t paid attention to (because) there isn’t anything in the present that doesn’t come from the past.

"Computing is not the box in front of you or me. It’s an idea which has as many variation as the human imagination is capable of. But we really don’t understand what it is. It’s part of how we think about the world, it's part of how we think about ourselves. These questions are why it makes sense to have a digital humanities."

A number of older professors have told Meeks that what he's doing is just the same as what they were doing 30 years ago. And they're right. The development of the digital humanities is an evolution, not a revolution. But the means by which practitioners of digital humanities are doing it makes all the difference in the world. Network theory may be 300 years old if you start from graph theory, but its contemporary practice allows a huge surge forward, a substantive savings in time and effort. The tools and methods have really "coalesced around new tech," Meeks said.

Tools like ArcGIS, Pagek, R, and Mathematica allow the creation of maps, networks, and statistical analyses of greater extent, faster than ever before. Now is the time of what Meeks called the "application of finally accessible tools, which provide an ease of use for what used to be very difficult, very jargon-filled packages." The availability of this new technology has not replaced, for instance, scientists. Instead, it has created a surge in citizen scientists.

"Better! Faster! More!" agreed Melissa Terras, co-director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University College London, and reader in electronic communication in its Department of Information Studies. "We can search much larger scale datasets than a human ever possibly could in a lifetime. Consider a medieval monk making a concordance of a Bible by hand—a lifetime's work. Now you can do that in seconds. But with the groundswell of data available—historical newspapers, books, etc.—the scale of the type of question changes exponentially, which then has knock-on effects on method, and how we understand the ramifications of what we are doing."

Imagism

As new generations of scholars grow to professional adulthood with digital humanities as part of their toolkit, it may cease to exist as a separate discipline. In the same way that the tools of Imagism invigorated modern poetry, but ceased to remain viable as a school, humanities may be given a rush of blood to the head by the use of digital tools and processes, but eventually stop considering it a separate practice.

However, Posner's comments indicate some may resist that merge unless it is also a political union.

"Many digital humanists hope our practice might be transformative to the academy," she said. "At UCLA we have a studio model, a culture for undergraduates acting in a collaborative way to produce work. As digital humanities winds its way into academic departments so will its values."

Regardless of the ultimate fate of the digital humanities, its present is well documented and growing like mad. The website for the centerNet, "an international network of digital humanities centers," lists over 150 centers devoted to the study, promulgation, and application of digital humanities.

Digital humanities is poised to assume a significant amount of conceptual real estate in the new Future U.

Curt Hopkins
Curt writes for Ars Technica about the intersection of culture and technology, including the democratization of information, spaceships, robots, the theatre, archaeology, achives and free speech. Twitter@curthopkins

13 Reader Comments

Humanities have always had an ambivalent attitude toward technology. Some see it as diminishing the creative aspect of humanities research. I don't see it that way. It simply allows us to accumulate massively more amounts of empirical data efficiently. Of course if your livelihood is accumulating empirical data or if you think the humanities are fundamentally different than sciences and this focus on "scientism" will obscure humanistic truths, then I can see why there are some reservations. The solution is in understanding what certain methods do and don't get you as far as understanding the phenomena.

Crowdsourcing of, say, swimming lessons, engineering, woodworking, or any profession where learning doesn't really happen without practice won't be of much use, at least in our current learning environment.

That's a critique of self-absorbed academia, not the value of the humanities in general.

And sadly (I say this as a physicist) physics today is generating some crap (bizarre speculations about the multiverse, the anthropic principle, the landscape and so on) detached from any sort of experimental evidence or verifiability.

Sokal was a cute gimmick coming at a time of the experimental validation of the Standard Model.Bringing it up now, after twenty years of physics-as-the-higher-nonsense is just sad.

We can hope that finding a Higgs at the LHC will end this depressing and embarrassing chapter in the history of physics, but that may be too optimistic. With organizations like Templeton eager to pour money into this stupidity, it could continue indefinitely.

That's a critique of self-absorbed academia, not the value of the humanities in general.

And sadly (I say this as a physicist) physics today is generating some crap (bizarre speculations about the multiverse, the anthropic principle, the landscape and so on) detached from any sort of experimental evidence or verifiability.

Sokal was a cute gimmick coming at a time of the experimental validation of the Standard Model.Bringing it up now, after twenty years of physics-as-the-higher-nonsense is just sad.

We can hope that finding a Higgs at the LHC will end this depressing and embarrassing chapter in the history of physics, but that may be too optimistic. With organizations like Templeton eager to pour money into this stupidity, it could continue indefinitely.

Humanities is all about critical examination that embraces multiple perspectives. Isn't this one? I really do not understand why some scholars choose to shoot down DH right away because humanists ≠ engineers in a conventional university model and use different vocabularies to approach the same problems.

One great thread of DH studies is examining the future of reading — how we can encounter and reinvent texts with a "better! faster! more!" attitude. A few examples of what I find exciting:The Van Gogh Letters collection: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/BookTwo.org: http://booktwo.org/Women Writers Project: http://www.wwp.brown.edu/ — this is a particularly good example of how the digital is reshaping the humanities. I'll paint in broad strokes too and say that we used to have a literary canon of maybe 200 books, but now digital scholarship can process and make accessible many millions of books. The WWP makes available pre-Victorian women's writing that had been otherwise unstudied and untaught.

I really do not understand why some scholars choose to shoot down DH right away because humanists ≠ engineers in a conventional university model and use different vocabularies to approach the same problems.

Because the way engineers approach problems is vastly different from the way "humanists" do?

Because the way engineers approach problems is vastly different from the way "humanists" do?

Bingo! That's just what makes digital humanities so intellectually exciting. The projects and scholarship I have admired or been a part of have been all about productive collaboration between people from different disciplines, including your fellow engineers.